s the ardor of the player's blood,
and often deprives him of the advantage of reflection. In fact, a man
after half an hour's play, who for the whole night may not have taken
any thing stronger than water, has all the appearance of drunkenness.'
And who has not seen the flushed cheek and the red eye, produced simply
by the excitement of an ordinary gaming table?

It is an additional proof of the evil of gaming that every person
devoted to it, _feels_ it to be an evil. Why then does he not refrain?
Because he has sold himself a slave to the deadly habit, as effectually
as the drunkard to his cups.

Burgh, in his Dignity of Human Nature, sums up the evils of this
practice in a single paragraph:

'Gaming is an amusement wholly unworthy of rational beings, having
neither the pretence of exercising the body, of exerting ingenuity, or
of giving any natural pleasure, and owing its entertainment wholly to
an unnatural and vitiated taste;--the cause of infinite loss of time,
of enormous destruction of money, of irritating the passions, of
stirring up avarice, of innumerable sneaking tricks and frauds, of
encouraging idleness, of disgusting people against their proper
employments, and of sinking and debasing all that is truly great and
valuable in the mind.'

Let me warn you, then, my young readers,--nay, more, let me _urge_ you
never to enter this dreadful road. Shun it as you would the road to
destruction. Take not the first step,--the moment you do, all may be
lost. Say not that you can command yourselves, and can stop when you
approach the confines of danger. So thousands have thought as sincerely
as yourselves--and yet they fell. 'The probabilities that we shall fall
where so many have fallen,' says Dr. Dwight, 'are millions to one; and
the contrary opinion is only the dream of lunacy.'

When you are inclined to think yourselves safe, consider the multitudes
who once felt themselves equally so, have been corrupted, distressed,
and ruined by gaming, both for this world, and that which is to come.
Think how many families have been plunged by it in beggary, and
overwhelmed by it in vice. Think how many persons have become liars at
the gaming table; how many perjured; how many drunkards; how many
blasphemers; how many suicides. 'If Europe,' said Montesquieu, 'is to
be ruined, it will be ruined by gaming.' If the United States are to be
ruined, gaming in some of its forms will be a very efficient agent in
accomplishing the